‘John Wick: Chapter 4’: How Keanu Reeves’ Stunt Double Became Hollywood’s Hottest Action Director

“Are we really gonna have dogs biting crotches?” These are the questions that keep Chad Stahelski up at night.

After getting his start doubling for Brandon Lee in The Crow and Keanu Reeves in The Matrix films, the former stuntman and stunt coordinator made his feature directorial debut (alongside fellow stunt expert David Leitch) with 2014’s John Wick. Stahelski, 54, has directed the rest of the franchise solo, culminating with the fourth (and, dare I say, best) installment, John Wick: Chapter 4, in theaters now. The action blockbuster’s received rave reviews and is projected to rake in mega box office bucks, making Stahelski the hottest action director in Hollywood.

To say that Stahelski and Reeves have raised the stakes in John Wick: Chapter 4 would be the understatement of the year. There are five gigantic action set pieces in the film — at the Osaka Continental, a soaking-wet Berlin nightclub, the Arc de Triomphe, an abandoned building in Paris, and the steps leading up to the Sacré-Cœur Basilica — and each one will make your jaw hit the floor.

There are also exciting new characters joining John Wick (Reeves), the Bowery King (Laurence Fishburne), Winston (Ian McShane), and Charon (the late Lance Reddick) on this wild ride, including the villainous Marquis Vincent de Gramont (Bill Skarsgård), a High Table member tasked with killing Wick; Chidi (Marko Zaror), the Marquis’ top henchman; Caine (martial-arts god Donnie Yen), a blind High Table assassin and friend of Wick’s hired to take his buddy out; Shimazu (Hiroyuki Sanada), sword-wielding manager of the Osaka Continental; Akira (pop star Rina Sawayama), his daughter/concierge who’s fierce with a bow; Mr. Nobody (Shamier Anderson), an assassin with a crotch-biting dog who’s on Wick’s tail; and Killa (an unrecognizable Scott Adkins), a Penguin-like gangster who finds himself in Wick’s path.

It is not only the best action movie of the year, but the best one in years, so we had to ask Stahelski all about how he pulled it off, the John Wick spinoff Ballerina, and what’s next for him.

[Warning: Spoilers ahead for John Wick: Chapter 4]

I first have to ask about Laurence Fishburne’s singing-Dante intro in John Wick: Chapter 4. Was that him improvising? How much of a runway do you give him to play in these?

I’ve known Laurence since the first Matrix. The Wachowskis were amazing mentors and teachers when it comes to how to recognize casts. Laurence is a huge theatrical actor, as you can tell. I’m a big Dante fan and love Inferno, so we wanted to start John Wick 4 with this booming underworld thing, since we have this Greek mythology going on. Other than “John Wick has gotta die and come full-circle,” the second big theme was “we’re putting the Underworld on and Laurence Fishburne has to open this thing with Dante.” When I sent Laurence the script, he texted back and said, “Fuck yeah.” That’s underground in the old Paris downtown. Me and Laurence went down with a Steadicam and I asked Laurence to give me a soundcheck and he just starts going off like it’s Shakespeare: “I am the motherfucking KING!”

My favorite line delivery of Laurence’s is in the second one where he goes, “Somebody PLEASE… get this man a gun.”

Laurence, Ian, and Keanu are very good at condensing. I overwrite a lot of times because I want to get the themes across. John Wick always has a lot more dialogue in the script than what Keanu says, because Keanu can boil down a paragraph to, “Yeah.” Laurence is always surprising. He’ll very rarely mimic the exact take again and again. He’ll go big, go small, try different inflections, so every time we do something with Laurence, we’re all like, “Let’s sit back and enjoy this.”

Keanu’s someone who’s been criticized for his acting ability in the past, which I’ve always thought was ridiculous and overlooked what Keanu does and how compelling he is. What do you think makes Keanu so compelling and so perfect as John Wick?

As a fan, why I enjoy watching him is this duality he has. He’ll play the badass, the goof, or whatever it is, and you like him. Why can he shoot 100 people in the face and you still like him? It’s a hard question to answer, because I know him personally and have been with him since The Matrix films, but I think John Wick is the closest thing to the actual Keanu Reeves. He’s very empathetic, very thoughtful, very introspective, and when you see the gentlemanliness, etiquette, and whole presence that John Wick projects, that’s literally Keanu. The metaphor is that John Wick is hard to kill, and Keanu is equally hard to kill. You can’t keep him down. And I think more than anything: he loves what he does. Every minute he relishes, just being in a room with a notebook and figuring out a scene — he’ll act out a whole scene with someone and it’ll be wacky stuff, and we’ll all try to figure out what’s going on — or being in the gym where he knows he has four hours ahead of him, he’s feeling like shit, he’s sore, and he still goes through with it. He loves it, and that’s rare.

Was there a moment on The Matrix where you guys knew you were pals?

I remember that he barely knew me on the first Matrix, and we did all the wire-y dojo fights, and I got my ass kicked. We were shooting in Australia and I was in this little hotel, and I just get up to my room and I get a call from the front desk: “You have a visitor in the lobby.” I walk downstairs — and this is after a full day of shooting way on the other side of Sydney — and there’s Keanu Reeves standing there by himself in the lobby with a box of wine. I’ve known him for maybe four weeks, only professionally, and he goes, “Man, congratulations on your first big day. Here you go. I really appreciate it.” And that wasn’t just me — that was everyone I saw him come into contact with over the years. Right off the bat, you go, “This guy is a class act.” I think what sums up Keanu best is people go, “Are you a lover or a fighter?” And Keanu goes, “You gotta be both, man. If you love something, you have to fight for it.”

What was the toughest scene in John Wick: Chapter 4 to pull off? Was it the Arc de Triomphe sequence?

Every set piece has its tricks, from the top-shot to the 40,000 gallons of water a minute we were pumping into the club. But as far as what gets my heart pumping? When you have your lead actor, who’s trained extensively, driving against four lanes of traffic at forty miles an hour. We took every precaution we could, but we’re smart enough to know things can go wrong. There isn’t a time when he’s driving that car that I’m not praying to the movie gods, “Please let us get this one.” Then you get your cast members on the cars, and I’ve got to trust twenty or thirty of my top stunt drivers to not hit Keanu and Marko Zaror while they’re running through traffic. If you watch the scene, Keanu never once does one of these [checks his blind spot] and there’s a fucking bus coming at him! There’s a bus coming at him and Keanu’s gotta know when to not step into the zone, so if you slip up once… Yes, the fight scene wire gags can hurt, and the dogs don’t know it’s a movie and they’re out there biting crotches, but when you have fifty stunt drivers, dogs, thirty stunt men amongst traffic speaking three or four different languages on the radio, it gets your heart pumping.

I think everyone after seeing the Arc de Triomphe sequence is like, “How the hell did they pull that off?”

We shot the entire sequence in Berlin at Tegel Airport. We shut down the whole airport. During COVID we went to Paris, and because the whole city was shut down, we got all our aerials, lidar, and photography done on the practicals, and we rebuilt it digitally with the actual Arc, which took eight months of slowly putting it together. The most we could’ve gotten if we shot at the actual Arc was four hours a night and it just wasn’t enough.

Do you know how many people John Wick kills in each movie?

[Laughs] I kinda know how many people he kills in the other ones, but not John Wick 4. I ask the editors not to tell me until the movie comes out. And then I know.

How did you pull off the bird’s-eye-view sequence of Wick killing from room to room?

We always knew we were going to go full Buster Keaton in the third act with the staircase sequence where it’s a metaphor for the whole movie — you climb to the top and get thrown back down, and we wanted that to be where him and Caine work together — and we knew we had the Arc, and we wanted to do a one, two, three. We got three days into the apartment-fight choreography sequence before we started shooting, and I’m like, “Ah, I’ve seen all this, this is boring.” We had the muzzle flashes because we wanted to create a different visual moment, and now people are all obsessed with oners, and most of these oners nowadays are digitally stitched. Children of Men and Ong-Bak are actual oners, but digitally stitched like it’s just a gag? If a shot dies, a shot dies. Cut. That was a oner that we shot in the apartment, but it lost momentum. We had people going, “Don’t cut! Don’t cut!” but I’m not trying to get an accolade for the longest top-shot, I just want the audience to be in it, and I liked the visual style of going up top and seeing the perspective of the bad guy and good guy. And the first time you see that Dragon’s breath go off, you’re like, “Fuck me!”

What tools have you taken from your time as a stuntman that have helped make you such a good action-movie director?

There’s the craftsman side of things — the logistics of how to set stuff up, the importance of rehearsals. If you look at the way I shoot action, it’s a dolly. I shoot very simple. If you go watch Gene Kelly in Singin’ in the Rain, it’s one dolly shot. So, what’s the secret? We know how to prep it better and we speak the language, so instead of spending all this money on visual effects we train the cast. I prep six months out when most people prep six weeks out. My cameramen, production designer, set designer, cinematographer are all at the stunt rehearsals, so by the time we walk on set we’re a well-oiled machine. What’s the difference between that sequence in the rain in Singin’ in the Rain and what you see in John Wick 4? There’s no difference. But why do people treat action like some foreign thing, some specialty? Spielberg, Nolan, and Tarantino shoot all their own action and it looks fucking fantastic, because you don’t break your style or process. I’ll give you the big secret to action: it’s not the choreography or the pretty angles. It’s the guy, or the person, or the woman, or the character. Jackie Chan could twirl teacups on his head and you’d love him because you love the guy. We spent a lot of time getting you to love Rina [Sawayama], Hiroyuki [Sanada], Donnie Yen. They all get their bit of breath. I know it’s a little slow — I get it — but I did it on purpose because I want you to love them. When Rina stabs that guy on the staircase, you love it.

Are there certain stunts in movies that all the stunt experts like yourself talk about and are like, “That’s gnarly. That’s up there with the best of ‘em.”

You go back and watch the car chase in Bad Boys or Michael Bay’s The Rock. There’s this guy in town, Bob Brown, who helped train me and is one of the best high-vault guys in the world. You go watch some of the falls he did in some of the movies he did, and you go, “How did a human being do that?” Bond with the DeLorean going into the water [in The Spy Who Loved Me]. My buddy Tim Rigby did that base jump off the Corvette in xXx when he surfs off the bridge. I mean, we quote that all the time. But pick any Jackie Chan fight scene. Or Donnie Yen in Flash Point. I still look at the train crash in Lawrence of Arabia and go, “How did they crash the train?”

Your career got off to a crazy start on The Crow, with you standing in for Brandon Lee following his death during filming. How did you pick yourself back up after that? I read that you two were friends who trained together.

Yeah. We ran in the same circles. There are a group of us from the Inosanto Academy who trained together and we all wanted to be stuntmen, and Brandon was working on his acting career. It was a fun group of guys. To answer your question… I don’t know. Stunts were at a weird point in time where we were still trying to figure stuff out. Effects were just starting to come up where you could do wire removal and digital muzzle flashes. The Crow was one of the first movies where they tried face-replacements, which was Brandon on myself. Yeah, it crushes you. I was still competing in martial arts at the time, so hadn’t made the full transition to stunts at that point. Brandon had died, and I came in to finish the rest of the film with his other double, Jeff Cadiente. You’re like, “Oh my god, is this real?” All the crazy Hollywood stuff aside, it’s like a construction site where you have to pay attention or you’re going to get hurt — or worse. And there’s no school to go to for this. Between that all the way up to Lance Reddick now, you lose people you love.

I was going to ask you about Lance Reddick. Did you know if he was in poor health?

You’re going to have to ask people closer to him. We had just seen Lance a week before in Los Angeles, and he was the pinnacle of health. He’s built like a pro athlete. To me, he seemed in fantastic shape. And my understanding is it was a sudden heart attack.

It’s strange to watch the film after hearing the news of his passing, because you memorialize his character in the film.

Lance’s DNA is all over this film. You go back ten years, and I’m going to pitch to you what the pitch was back then: “So, it’s about a retired assassin who’s gotten married, his wife dies of natural causes, he gets pulled back in because somebody killed his puppy, and he’s going to shoot 84 people in the head. And on top of that, I’m going to put this weird Greek mythology on it, so it’s going to be like a modern-day Lord of the Rings.” We pretty much got turned away everywhere. We finally had to do it independently, and we started casting. Keanu was the one that hired myself. I believe Lance was probably the first cast member we got. Me and Dave Leitch were big fans of his from The Wire and we also knew about him from video games. We sit Lance down and we give him the pitch: “OK, we’re calling your character Charon. He’s gonna be the guardian of this Underworld, he’ll have this whole lair, and you’re gonna do this.” Lance takes off his glasses, puts them back on, and says, “Great. Super. Maybe he’ll have an African accent and do this and that?” He immediately got it.

Cut to ten years later, and we hand him the script for John Wick 4, with his character passing away in it. I get this text from him that goes, “Hey, can we talk?” and I go, “OK, I know what this is gonna be about.” He gets me on a Zoom call and goes, “I love it, but I hate it. I hate that he dies, but I love how it effects the movie. I’m so twisted about it I just need to talk to you.” We talked and then he ultimately went, “Stop. I get it. You guys did the best version of this. It fucking sucks because I love this character, but I am wholeheartedly in.” That’s the kind of gracious artist he is.

Speaking of dead characters… is John Wick really dead?

Whether you think John — or John Wick — is dead, that’s your interpretation. These movies are supposed to be mythological fables, and there are consequences. When you do bad things, bad things happen. If there is another way for John to get out of this, or another way to have a satisfying conclusion to this particular journey, I’m happy to hear it. But you can’t do a whole series about consequence and fate without showing consequence and fate. You have to bring it full-circle. Now, did John allow that all to happen just so he could go back to John? I love films or books that are open to interpretation.  

Is Rina’s character Akira going to come back at some point too and get her vengeance?

Oh my god, she’s great. I had no idea she was a pop star. I hired her cold right off YouTube. I saw a picture of her on YouTube in a video — she has this orange wig on — had no idea who she was, it took two weeks for her to sink into my head, and I called her. In every video, she looked different. And we got on a Zoom call and she has this lovely British accent and I said, “Hi, I’m Chad. I direct the John Wick movies. Would you like to be in one?” And she goes quiet and says, “Well, I’m not an actress.” And I said, “Do you want to be?” I told her to come to Berlin to meet me and Keanu, and the next week she did, and by the time we were done we got her. You can ask the stunt guys: she was early every day, and the last one out every night. A lot of ice packs, but she was doing her thing. If Lionsgate came back after our opening weekend and said, “How do we incorporate Rina? How do we incorporate Shamier? How do we keep this world going?” I would be excited about that. Does Rina appear in Ballerina? As far as I know, no. Keanu, Ian, and Lance Reddick all did work on Ballerina for Len Wiseman. But I love the character of Akira. I would love to see more.

We were introduced to Ana de Armas’ character in Ballerina in John Wick 3 as the Russian ballet dancer dancing for Anjelica Huston’s character. How will that film tie in with the John Wick universe?

I try to keep my distance a little bit because we want Len to do his thing. We tried to help set it up as best we could with the color, style, and thematics of how we do the John Wicks, but ultimately you have to hand it over to the director. Ballerina happens between John Wick 3 and John Wick 4, so it happens in a different timeline. John Wick, Ian, Lance, and The Continental make appearances.

What’s next for you? Your name is attached to like a dozen projects. Is it Highlander? Rainbow Six?

Hollywood likes a good announcement. I’m excited to work with Michael B. Jordan, so Rainbow Six is at the top of my list. One of my favorites for the last three years is Ghosts of Tsushima. Between the cast and the world-building, that would be a dream. And then you have Highlander, which is another world-building epic that spans 500 years. If any one of those three comes first, that would be fantastic. And I also have Black Samurai at Netflix. I’m trying to figure out which one I can do right. I’m kind of obsessive about it. I need to know that the next two years of my life are going to be spent on something we can see, and we didn’t just get it done to get it done. I’d be the most fortunate director in Hollywood to get any of these done. I’m probably going to take next week to sleep, then I’ll jump back in with my stunt team and work out a little bit, and then take a moment and see where everything lands.

From Rolling Stone US.